Scotland error numbers for cervical screening ‘may be higher’

A higher number of women who were mistakenly told they did not need cervical screening may have gone on to develop cancer.

It was recently announced that a woman in Scotland had died from cervical cancer after being wrongly excluded from the country’s screening programme.

She was among 434 women who were told they did not need to be screened following partial hysterectomies after 1997.

Maree Todd, Scotland’s Public Health Minister, said “I’m afraid we may well be looking at higher numbers” adding that records from before 1997 would be more difficult to access but that the work should be done by the end of this month.

She said that they were also looking at the records of every women who had been excluded because of a full hysterectomy (around 200,000 patients) “as a precaution”.

The mistake was discovered during a routine audit of a single unnamed health board, following which all health boards were examined and 434 women were found to have been incorrectly excluded from screening.

Ms Todd said a “small number” of the women had subsequently developed cervical cancer. She said that the number was less than five, but she could not reveal the exact number because it risked identifying the women.

She went on to say that it was a “extremely complex issue, spanning a number of decades and involving a variety of potential errors”.

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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.

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